More than 1,600 Catholic St. Louis youth are en route to Washington, DC on the Generation Life Pilgrimage!

Calling all youth! Is your bus the best bus? Is your group showing extra pride as you stand up for life? PROVE IT and win some awesome giveaways during tomorrow night's programming!

Here's how you enter:

1. Take your best photo on your Gen Life bus
2. Go to our Facebook page Facebook.com/archstl and hit "like"
3. Upload your photo to our Gen Life bus photo contest
4. Get everyone you know to vote for your photo, calculated by how many "likes" you get!
(Tip, share on your own page and through Twitter and email for maximum support!)

It's that simple! We will announce the winners on the Live Blog and through social media tomorrow night right before programming starts and winners can collect their prizes then. Best of luck!

Sunday, January 19, 2014 marks the start of our Generation Life pilgrimage! The Office of Youth Ministry is excited to announce that we will have over 1,600 people from all around the Archdiocese of St. Louis gathering at 5 parishes: Assumption-Mattis, Holy Redeemer-Webster Groves, St. Cletus-St. Charles, St. Gerard Majella-Kirkwood, and St. Joseph-Cottleville. Even though our 31 buses will be sending off from different locations, we will all be united through the Mass, in our prayer, travel, and mission. Read more »

As approximately 1,700 Catholic St. Louis youth prepare to embark on a 12.5 hour drive to Washington, DC to attend the March for Life, it's important that they are reminded of the rules to follow on the coed busses.

Parents of prolife teens can rest easy knowing that the following video will be shown on all busses and the rules will be enforced by staffers and volunteers!

What do you think of our approach to making the rules fun and easy for the teens to follow? Leave a comment below, we'd love to hear from you!

On January 22, 2014, about 1,700 pro-life high school and eighth grade students from the Archdiocese of St. Louis will join hundrends of thousands of other pro-lifers in Washington D.C. to stand up for the unborn at the March for Life.

In the days leading up to the March, the St. Louis youth will take part in the Generation Life Pilgrimage to experience the presence of Christ's love and compassion through presentations from incredible speakers, Eucharistic Adoration, Mass with Archbishop Robert J. Carlson and more. The education and spiritual nourishment provided will help prepare the youth to be witnesses for life and human dignity amongst a culture of death.

This year, you will be able to share in the experience of the Generation Life Pilgrimage from home. We will keep you up to date through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine and, of course, right here on the STL Youth Live Blog!

Curious about Franciscan LEAD? Wondering who those teens were who shared their faith stories on stage during the conference? Here's an inside scoop from Emily, a St. Louis native who pariticpated in LEAD during Week One this summer.

This year for Steubenville Mid-America, I was blessed to be able to attend LEAD (LEAD is an acronym which stands for Leadership Evangelization And Discipleship). After seeing how excited other teens from my youth group were after attending LEAD, a week-long retreat leading up to the Steubenville youth conference, I decided that it was something I may be interested in doing.

I attended Steubenville last year, and I assumed that LEAD would simply feel like an extended Steubenville. I was wrong. Read more »

For the past fifteen years, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis has been blessed to host Steubenville Youth Conferences, which have served nearly 50,000 teens.

Conferences like this simply cannot happen without the dedication of many staff members and volunteers, most of whom work behind the scenes out of love for God and His people.

Since 1999, the primary organizer of these Steubenville youth conferences has been Rosanne Twellmann, Coordinator of Events for the Office of Youth Ministry. It is our great loss that Rosanne will be heading into retirement this fall. Though we will miss her, we are grateful for her dedicated service and wish her all of God’s best in the future.

As today’s conference came to a close, she was given the gift of a beautiful quilt made out of t-shirts from all of the conferences she has organized.

Rosanne’s influence could never be measured, but we know that she has made a huge difference in countless people’s lives. Read more »

To conclude our conference, we participated in the greatest act of worship - the celebration of the Eucharist.

In his homily - which you can hear in its entirety here - Bishop Rice challenged us to think about how we will respond when we go back home and people ask us about this weekend. And though it can be challenging to summarize what happened here in a few sentences, today’s Gospel gives us the answer.

Like Mary, we have been sitting at the feet of Jesus - and hopefully we will go home with the realization that it is enough to simply be in His presence.

However, it is important to keep in mind that when we sit at the feet of Jesus, He eventually invites us to stand with Him at the cross. Living with Jesus has consequences: He never gets enough of us. He always wants more of us.

He is fascinated by you; He thinks you are an amazing person. Read more »

Tonight, our keynote speaker Mary Bielski spoke of everyone’s desire to be chosen. We all want to be picked to be on a sports team, we like to have our stuff “liked” on social media, we want to be noticed by others. Ultimately, we all just want to be wanted.

And yet, the reality is that most of us are disappointed by life. Our siblings, members of the opposite sex, our friends, our parents can all fall short of loving us as much as we need.

Regardless of how we feel and how disappointed we may be by life, there’s no question about it: God has chosen us. The only real question is whether or not we will choose Him.

Mary recalled, the day that Jesus was put to death, that there was another man on trial. Pilate said that one man could go free, and the crowd (persuaded by the Scribes) chose Barabbas.

When we place ourselves into this story, we can only really take the place of Barabbas – we’ve all fallen short and sinned, and we all deserve death, but Christ took our punishment upon himself. Read more »

Something very powerful happens when hundreds of men are gathered in one space solely for the purpose of developing a deeper relationship with God. This afternoon, we were challenged, we prayed, and we sang.

Our speaker Paul Kim began by talking about movies, noting that there is a difference between stupid movies and epic movies. We get inspired when we watch epic movies, whereas stupid movies simply lower our IQs.

We tend to love learning about men (in movies, in real life, and in Scripture) who know who they are, are willing to fight for others, and are willing to die - if need be - for an important cause.

He told the story from the book of Daniel of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego - who refused to worship a false God and were subsequently thrown into a fiery furnace (but not burned) because God was with them. We are all regularly tempted to worship false Gods, but it's important to be faithful to God, who is always with us. Read more »